Milkenize Me

Cal Fussman just wanted to lose a few pounds. instead, he discovered a completely new way to eat.

The photo on the wall showed me boxing in 1993. The belly in front of me announced that it was 2005. My eyes moved back and forth.

As I launched a left hook in the photo, I could see the stark outline of my ribs.

Twelve years later, my stomach was as round as a seedless watermelon.

What the hell happened?

As if I didn't know. How can a man even ask himself such a question when he eats pastrami sandwiches stacked higher than two hands can grip? When Sunday-morning pancakes in his home are weekly festivals that attract people from around the world? When his drawer is filled with barbecue-competition T-shirts inscribed with slogans like I DIDN'T CLAW MY WAY TO THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN TO EAT VEGETABLES?

Yeah, it was time for a diet.

My favorite of the ones I came across was the Buddy Diet. Two portly friends figured the easiest way to lose some weight would be to wager who could shed more pounds in a month. Good concept. Trouble was, they were too competitive. Soon, each was tempting his buddy by having pizzas and quarts of ice cream delivered to the other guy's home and office. The outcome was inevitably decided by who'd gained less in a month.

Let's face it: Diets just don't work. Even when they're successful, they fail. We all know the routine. As soon as you've reached your goal, the regimen eases, all the old habits creep back, and after a while you've gained more than you lost and you're looking for a new diet.

But I was forty-eight years old. My mother had cancer. I sensed the Big C would be coming after me if I didn't make some changes. My stomach just had to go.

And that's another problem with diets: We always jump into them with our eyes on our stomachs. But I was fortunate. A very smart man showed me how to look inside my head.

Milken's journey -- from the most powerful man in finance back in the eighties to the central character in a Wall Street scandal to the force he is today in the battle against cancer -- is quite a tale in itself. But that's another story. What attracted me to him was very simple: He had beaten prostate cancer, and he had done so in part by reinventing the way he eats. And he agreed to help me.

So I headed to Milken's Prostate Cancer Foundation in Santa Monica, California, and sat down at a table topped with what appeared to be an ordinary Caesar salad and smoothie alongside an elegant serving of chocolate pudding.

"There are very few people on this planet who love to eat more than I did," Milken told me. "I used to compete in eating contests in college, and I retired with a very good record. When I was diagnosed with cancer and given eight months to live, I didn't know if my eating pattern was causing the disease. So I went to only fruits and vegetables until I could figure it out. There was just no hot dog worth dying for. Once I became stabilized, I wanted my favorite foods back. But I wasn't willing to jeopardize my health. So that set off this quest to create foods based on science."

The food set on the table before me was invented by the chef seated across the table. Beth Ginsberg had figured out ways to mimic the tastes of all the dishes that Milken loved -- right down to Reuben sandwiches and BLTs -- using ingredients that boost the body's immune system and kick out the carcinogens. It may be hard to imagine a BLT without bacon, but Milken swore by the tofu bologna in his.

"I've found that through creativity, I'm able to eat almost anything I desire," he said. "When I think of everything that Beth has made, there's only one that we've had a problem with."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"The caramel popcorn balls," Beth recalled, shaking her head. "I didn't cook the caramel long enough, and it got stuck to Mike's teeth."

"I literally could not open my mouth," Milken said. "I put hot water in to try to loosen the grip, but I think it was forty minutes before I could pry my teeth apart."

"See that Caesar salad?" Milken said. "There's probably a half gram of fat in there, from the dressing. That's about fifty calories. So if you eat seventy of those, you would gain one pound. My guess is you'll burn a lot of calories chewing. And if you ate seventy Caesar salads today, you'd have a hard time eating anything else." (For the Caesar recipe and the others mentioned in this story, go to esquire.com/milken.)

Milken spent the better part of the next hour talking about how the produce section of the grocery store may well be the medicine cabinet of the twenty-first century, and about research that proved you could lower the carcinogens in a hamburger simply by grilling at a lower heat and flipping the patty more frequently as it cooked.

Then he asked me a single question that changed my life. "What's your cholesterol?"

I started to speak, but no words came out. I knew the number. But I didn't want to admit it -- just as I'd been avoiding scales. My cholesterol was 260 the last time I'd checked. My doctor wanted it below 200 and recommended medication. Not only had I refused, I had cranked up the smoker. Thanksgiving in my home was a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey packed with seafood jambalaya, smoked for fourteen hours.

All he'd asked for was a number. I'd served him up a sloppy helping of jumbalaya. I fessed up: "Right now, I don't know...."

"Cal," he said. "It's always better to know."

Photograph by Xtra-P

Knowledge

I bought a digital scale that measured to the tenth of a pound. The first time I stepped on it, it spoke very clearly. I was heavier than I'd ever been: 183. That's fine if you're six feet tall. But I'm five foot five and a half. According to something called the body-mass index (see "How Do I Calculate My Ideal Weight?"), I was obese.

I wrapped a tape measure around my waist and winced. Forty inches. I didn't know it then, but that tape measure was the start and finish line. If you calculate your height in inches and divide by two, you'll know what the size of your waist should be.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Once you want to know, sentences start to jump out of newspaper articles that you'd normally overlook. You become aware that automakers are increasing the width of our seats so that we feel comfortable with our added weight. That nearly two out of ten men and four out of ten women of recruiting age weigh too much to be eligible to join the armed forces -- and that one Army nutrition expert is warning that obesity is becoming a national-security issue. That studies show that lean people earn more money than obese people who have the same IQ.

The more you know, the more you want to know about what you're putting inside your body.

Pancakes

I set recipes for my pancakes and the blueberry-banana pancakes in The Taste for Living Cookbook: Mike Milken's Favorite Recipes for Fighting Cancer side by side. (See opposite.) Now I know why mine are not good for you and Milken's are. Ingesting all-purpose flour is like eating powdered sugar. It's a simple carbohydrate that your body converts to glucose, which prompts your insulin level to rise. And once your glucose level falls, guess what? Your body chemistry is off balance, and you're hungry again.

The Milken pancakes contain no egg yolks, which carry cholesterol. Vanilla soy milk has neither milk fats nor pesticides that the cow ingested. When you spray canola oil on a pan, you usually use less than when you pour oil or melt butter. And the feeling of fullness these pancakes create comes because the oat flour and the whole-wheat flour are complex, not simple, carbs. Not only does whole-grain flour seem to expand in your stomach, it also slows down the transit time of food through your gut, so you feel fuller for longer.

But knowing that can't convince you what tastes good -- or could it?

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It's always risky to serve a recipe you've never prepared. And in my home, it was blasphemy to do it on a Sunday.

Sunday-morning pancakes are holy ground.

But Milken had emboldened me when he described an annual extravaganza he threw called the Gourmet Games. Meat dishes and nonmeat mimics are served side by side to hundreds of people, and Milken dares the diners to identify which is which. Warren Beatty has not been very successful -- nor has anyone else. And if that seems unbelievable, all I can tell you is that Milken has been keeping stats and can rattle them off like a baseball fan.

So I figured I'd leave it up to the most impartial of judges -- my kids and their friends -- to detect any differences in the Milken pancakes from the champions they all knew and loved.

I was not at all prepared for what transpired. Not one of the six- to ten-year-olds looked up from his or her plate and said, "Hey, what's going on here? These aren't the usual pancakes!"

Nor did any one of them ask for seconds, thirds, or fourths, like usual. Eight kids continued their merry conversation around the table, and when they were finished, they thanked me and scurried out to play.

I was overjoyed. I was wounded.

The kids had finished the pancakes without the slightest criticism. But I hadn't gotten the usual praise. I was no longer the Dad Who Made the Best Pancakes in the World.

I set three on my plate and carefully chewed. They were good. But I didn't reach for seconds, either. I felt full. Not bloated. Pleasantly full, on 209 calories.

WireImage

Salad, Soda, Meat

I began chewing on those Caesar salads. (It turns out miso paste approximates the flavor of anchovies quite well.) I began eating reconfigured BLTs. In three weeks, my weight dropped to 175. Without trying, I'd stopped eating red meat at home.

I began to wean myself off the hot dogs I usually ate at my favorite airport deli by always having one bite less than the last time I'd eaten one. I replaced beige foods, at the recommendation of Milken's friend Dr. David Heber, with a rainbow of colored vegetables to fight off cancer. And I was mocked. One waiter, after I'd asked him for six different colors in my salad, wisecracked when he came back for dessert: "What do you want now, a tricolored coffee?" But the pounds began to melt away.

The best part was I didn't feel as if I was on a diet. Milken had simply given me his cookbook to start. There was no drill sergeant. No boot camp. Beth Alcala at Duke Medical Center seemed a little concerned when my cholesterol checked in at 240. But I was relieved. My weight was down to 169. My PSA level, a measure of prostate-specific antigen in the blood, was 1.5. My prostate was fine.

And my mind was now constantly searching for new ways to change old habits.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Soda went down next. A photo that flashed on the screen during a presentation on nutrition at Milken's annual conference did the trick. It seemed to be a very ordinary photo, at first, of a man buying a soft drink from a vending machine. But no can popped out. Instead, sugar had come through the vent -- pounds of sugar. The guy was up to his kneecaps in sugar.

All I could think of was my father. My dad drinks soda for breakfast.

I settled upon four types of liquids: water, green tea, fresh fruit juices, and Milken smoothies. The smoothies filled me up and kept me from idly reaching into the refrigerator. They also offered an energy boost and keen sense of alertness twenty minutes later. Yankees manager Joe Torre has a Milken smoothie in the fifth inning of every game. Here's my favorite:

After a couple of months, I was down 17.5 pounds. Only 11 more were needed to reach my target weight: 154.

My taste buds were actually changing. I stopped eating hot dogs at the airport. They'd begun to taste polluted. Whenever I was tempted to reach for a soda, an image of that sugar-loaded vending machine popped into my mind and shoved me away. It didn't seem very hard because it didn't seem as if I was on a diet. I wasn't denying myself anything that I really wanted.

What I didn't count on was that a few weeks later I'd be scarfing down thirty-six hundred calories a day in Häagen-Dazs alone.

Ice Cream

I got blindsided.

I came home one afternoon to find out that friends of my family were shot and killed in their own bedroom. Two parents. Their teenage son later admitted to doing the shooting. To this day, I haven't the slightest clue why. But news of the tragedy flashed across the country, and my phone rang off the hook with requests to explain the events to the world, while family members asked that their privacy be respected.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

My head swiveled between the TV vans in my driveway and the ringing telephone. For the first time in my life, I was caring for my parents, who were devastated, as well as my kids, who couldn't possibly grasp what had occurred. I didn't sleep much. In the beginning, I didn't eat much. But people touched by the tragedy began to bond around food, and I stopped thinking about what I should eat.

I just wanted to feel good.

Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond makes me feel good.

At least three times a day I would escape to the supermarket and buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs. It rarely lasted through a sitting. I didn't care that one serving is three hundred calories. Or that four servings in a pint add up to twelve hundred. Or that three pints a day totaled thirty-six hundred. Why bother watching what I ate? If you were going to leave this world at any moment, wouldn't you rather have ice cream on your lips than broccoli? As Thornton Wilder once wrote: "Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." Then one morning I started to get out of bed, and my momentum was literally stopped by my belly. My stomach was larger than it was before I'd stepped into Milken's foundation.

My Mother, My Father

Well, what was it going to be?

On one side of my parents' dinner table was my father. He'd been overweight since his honeymoon. Diet Cokes for breakfast with cheese omelettes and home fries. Pastrami sandwiches for lunch. Steak and potatoes for dinner. Cheesecake for dessert. He was completely at peace, and a very good time he'd had.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"If you gave me a choice," he said, "between living a few more years or eating good steaks, I say: Give me the steaks." He's now seventy-five -- and he'll probably live until a hundred, because he doesn't give a damn.

On the other side of the table was my mother, with a surgical mask over her mouth. The medication she'd been given to fight off cancer betrayed her and caused the bone above her top row of teeth to crumble and fall through her gums. Her biggest fear, stronger than death, was that the entire bone would go and her face would cave in.

Eat like my father, I couldn't help but wonder, and suffer like my mother?

Whatever my weight was, the situation was worse than I realized. Muscle burns more calories than fat. I'd gained fat. So it would be more difficult to take the weight off than the first time. On top of that, a brutal work-travel schedule kicked in, which knocked out my ability to use Milken's recipes. Now I was stranded in airports, the worst spots in America to eat. Every place that sells food at an airport has you over a barrel. A simple candy bar is marketed at twice the size so that you'll have to pay double the price. Even the bananas look plastic.

I'd been knocked off balance by an extreme circumstance, and now I was being forced to recover in an extremely bad setting. There was only one solution: I fought back by becoming extreme myself.

I started with a simple tip that I took off a Web site called miavita.com to combat the ever-growing portions in America's restaurants: Ask your waiter to take half of the food off your plate and put it into a doggie bag before it arrives at the table. Then I whittled down what I ate to fresh -- but not farmed -- fish, soy for protein, and as many colors of fruits and vegetables as I could get on my plate. I filled my belly with water at airports to avoid feeling hungry. I used to avoid scales. Now I avoided friends who were accustomed to meeting me over expansive meals. I brought my own produce when I went to my folks' to eat. One day, a moment came that couldn't be avoided.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

My father sat on one side of the table with his pastrami sandwich and soda. I sat on the other with nine colors on my plate. His patterns were so ingrained that he couldn't stop himself from holding out his pastrami sandwich to me, silently offering me a bite.

There he was, the man who'd given me so many of the great moments in my life: the hot dogs across from Madison Square Garden before Knicks games; the introduction to lobster tails at a restaurant where he got up and belted out tunes with the pianist; the Ring Dings, Yodels, Yankee Doodles, and Devil Dogs washed down with milk every night before bed. The first night I felt like a man was the night I bought my father a steak dinner. And I'd grown to watch him stuff cakes in his pockets to hand to my children behind my wife's back. She was exasperated because she didn't understand. In my family, food was an expression of love.

My eyes moved from my father's sandwich up to his eyes.

"No," I said.

A very confused -- and sad -- look came to his face. But my own mind was as clear as stream water.

The closer I got to my target weight, the more relaxed I became. I needed to relax. It was a bleak experience. Looking back, I should have taken a hint from Milken. He had fun with it, tricking his carnivore friends into eating Reuben sandwiches made from tempeh and soy and delighting in the shock on their faces when he told them what they'd just gobbled down.

What I needed was the Buddy Diet. Someone to come along with me and laugh at how terrible some soy cheeses can taste and roll his eyes at some of the eyebrow-, nose-, and lip-pierced vegans you meet along the way. Someone who'd go through Milken's cookbook a recipe at a time with me. Someone who'd show up for a meal with a story about a longtime Clemson football season-ticket holder who'd been forced to stop going to games by the widening asses that had slowly covered up his part of the bench.

I needed to laugh. As I approached my target weight, I began to remember to eat the ice cream on my plate.

So I ate the turducken on Thanksgiving. Not as much as usual, but I enjoyed it. I began to call friends again and meet them at restaurants. I took a bite of a pastrami sandwich when my dad offered it. I just made sure there were always six different-colored vegetables on my plate.

My Birthday

Sixty is the new forty, Milken likes to say. With proper nutrition and exercise, we can turn back the clock. He's right. On my fiftieth birthday, I hit my target weight: 154.

And I felt thirty.

A year and a half after I'd started, I'd shaved seven inches off my waist. I stood sixty-six inches on tiptoe. My waist was exactly half of that -- thirty-three. My cholesterol came in 50 points lower than it was originally. And that was better than if I had done it with medication, because there were no side effects.

I wasn't making a boxing comeback. But now I knew that only a tiny percentage of Amish men are obese because most walk eighteen thousand steps a day. And I knew I was going to get a pedometer to count my footsteps.

I also knew that further down the road I was going to start yoga. Because this was not about a diet. This was about continually stretching my mind.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.